A Look at White Power Music Today

Once the premier record label and distributor on the white-power music scene, things just haven't been the same for Resistance Records lately.

Sales that once helped Resistance's owner, the neo-Nazi National Alliance, gross revenues of nearly $1 million a year are a fraction of what they used to be.

After several boycotts of the label by various white supremacist groups and disillusioned former members of the Alliance, Resistance's fall has given rise to other distributors who have stolen away customers and musicians, even though its operators claim to still have £1 million ($1.7 million) worth of inventory in its West Virginia warehouse.

Even Resistance's once-popular message board has lost most of its visitors. Most of those who frequent racist forums have abandoned the Web site, leaving the occasional poster who returns only to make disparaging remarks about the National Alliance and its struggling leadership that are quickly deleted.

While most of Resistance's travails followed the 2002 death of National Alliance founder William Pierce, it was comments that Pierce made while he was still alive that launched the downward spiral.

Shortly after Pierce's death, the Intelligence Report reported on extremely derogatory remarks he had made in secret at an NA leadership conference some four months earlier about other white supremacist groups, particularly the very Skinheads who happened to make up most of Resistance's customer base. The story also described how Erich Gliebe, the man who succeeded Pierce as leader and still runs Resistance today, had made similarly disparaging remarks about others on the racist scene at the same leadership conference.

The published remarks -- including Pierce's description of the "freaks and weaklings" inhabiting other racist groups -- caused a major backlash. Sales slipped as groups like the Keystone State Skinheads angrily boycotted Resistance.

But Resistance's troubles aren't entirely attributable to Gliebe and Pierce's sneering disdain for their customers. The label also had other issues, including poor management, as one poster on a racist message board noted recently.

"You shouldn't order from Ratsistance," the poster warned. "They tend to lose all your personal information to the feds. Not to mention Gliebe has admitted to not liking 90% of their customers. They do also have the worst customer service, always have, even when Dr. Pierce was still alive."